In silver halide color photographic materials, in order to form a color image, use is made of dye-forming couplers (hereinafter referred to as couplers) that can couple with the oxidized product of an aromatic primary amine developing agent to form a yellow dye, a magenta dye, and a cyan dye. It is desirable that the yellow dye, the magenta dye, and the cyan dye formed from these couplers are ones that only absorb light in the blue range, the green range, and the red range, and that give bright hues. However, azomethine dyes of 5-pyrazolones that are currently and widely used have subsidiary absorption in the blue range, and phenol and naphthol type indoaniline dyes have undesirable absorption in the blue range and/or green range. Therefore, in order to correct color contamination due to this undesirable absorption, as one technique in color negative films, a masking technique of correcting color by using a colored coupler is employed. However, since colored couplers are a colored substance, basically they were accompanied by a lowering of sensitivity. For example, to correct the subsidiary absorption of green light of the formed dye of a cyan coupler, a magenta-colored cyan coupler is added in a red-sensitive layer itself. It was found that due to the absorption by this magenta-colored cyan coupler on the longer wavelength side, the amount of light on the shorter wavelength side for the red-sensitive layer became insufficient. For instance, when phenol-type cyan couplers having a 2-ureido group, disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,333,999, or 4,451,559, are used as a cyan coupler, since their developed dyes have much of the above-mentioned subsidiary adsorption, it is required to use a magenta-colored cyan coupler, which results in a conspicuous lowering of the sensitivity of the red layer.
Further, it was found that, for the same reason, if a yellow-colored magenta coupler was used in a green-sensitive layer, the amount of light on the shorter wavelength side for the green-sensitive layer became insufficient, resulting in a lowering of the sensitivity.
Further, for a multilayer color negative film having a blue-sensitive layer, a green-sensitive layer, and a red-sensitive layer, if a colored coupler is used in an upper layer, since light is absorbed there, the sensitivity of the lower layer naturally lowers. In a multilayer film having a blue-sensitive emulsion layer and a green-sensitive emulsion layer that are coated in the stated order from the exposure plane, there arise the following disadvantages. In common subtractive color negative films, the blue-sensitive emulsion layer contains as an image-forming coupler a coupler that will develop to yellow. In order to correct undesired subsidiary absorption of green light of the formed dye of this yellow coupler, it is required that a magenta-colored coupler is used together with a yellow coupler in the blue-sensitive emulsion layer. However, in this case the amount of light for the green-sensitive emulsion layer situated below becomes insufficient, resulting in a fatal lowering of the sensitivity. For the same reason, in a multilayer negative film having a green-sensitive emulsion layer as the uppermost layer, it was difficult to use a yellow-colored coupler together with a magenta coupler.